"My beautiful dream is over, and what is the waking?
wretchedness, unutterable wretchedness! My God, my God, Thy hand is heavy upon me, yet I would submit." He clasped his mother's hands convulsively in his, he drooped his head upon them, and his slight frame shook beneath the agony, which for hours he had been struggling to subdue.

Mrs.Hamilton clasped him to her bosom; she endeavoured to speak words of hope and comfort.
Silence deep and solemn fell over that little party; it was so fearful to see Herbert thus--the gentle, the self-controlled, the exalted Herbert thus bowed down even to the earth; he, whose mind ever seemed raised above this world; he, who to his family was ever a being of a brighter, holier sphere.

If he bent thus beneath the pressure of earthly sorrow, what must that sorrow be?
His family knew the depth of feeling existing in his breast, which the world around them never could suspect, and they looked on him and trembled.

Myrvin raised him from the arms of his mother, and bore him to the nearest couch, and Mrs.Hamilton wiped from his damp brow the starting dew.

Tears of alarm and sympathy were streaming from the eyes of Emmeline, and Myrvin resigned his post to Percy, to comfort her.